


Or the Last Thing I See

by ftmsteverogers



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Fix-It, Ghosts, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Jewish Steve Rogers, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), mlm author
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-19 06:28:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14868503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftmsteverogers/pseuds/ftmsteverogers
Summary: Go to the place where they killed me,Bucky had said in the dream.I’ll explain more when I can. Trust me.Steve trusted him. He trusted him enough to start hoping.





	Or the Last Thing I See

Bucky had melted into the air many times, now.

In the war, he’d been chosen to be a sniper before Steve had even set foot in Europe, mastering the skill of wrapping himself in shadows. Bucky’s men had trusted him. They had also been afraid of him. A hidden weapon was good, and useful, but there was no way to stop being wary when the weapon was hiding himself, emerging later from the treeline with shuttered eyes and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, never quite in the exact position he’d declared over radio.

A lifetime later, the Winter Soldier disappeared into thin air the moment Steve said his name out loud. Steve invoked him from the dark, dredged up a dead man from the dirt with one word, and then watched him disappear — he blinked, and then Bucky was gone. Even as the blood rushed in his ears, it had felt right, it had felt as it should be, not to see him turn his back.

Now, with his hand raised just barely above a pile of ash, Steve did not speak. He did not breathe. He sat down in the dirt and touched the ash. Made a fist around some of it. He held it, weighed it in his hand, felt it grow cool in the cup of his palm. Bucky had disappeared on him many times by now, Steve was used to it, so he just held the ash. He would have taken off his gloves to feel it better if that did not mean letting go of his handful.

His friends arrived one by one, the absent ones very obvious in the space they didn’t take up. Sam was slow to meet them, but he was coming soon, surely. He would arrive any second now with one of his easy grins and warm eyes and he would uncurl Steve’s fingers from where they were white-knuckled around his fistful of cold ash.

“Are we all that’s left?” Natasha asked.

“Sam,” Steve said. “Where’s Sam.”

No one answered him. This was answer enough.

Steve would not move from this dirt. His friends would pick him up and drag him away or they would leave him, and he did not care which. The serum had given him more energy to fight with than should have been poured into any single body, but it was not magic, and he had always known that it would run out someday. He was done, now. He’d used up the last of it to battle through this one final war.

This was fitting, he supposed. The history books called him the world’s best soldier, but he had yet to fight in a war he did not lose.

 

* * *

 

Things went hazy for a while.

It was Thor who ended up hauling him up into his arms and carrying him back to the palace, Steve limp as a rag doll, eyes unfocused. It was like being small and sick again, only Steve didn’t feel guilty about it this time, because there was no room in his body for anything but grief. What he felt was so enormous that it filled him entirely, roaring inside him, seeping out of his half-parted lips as he breathed. He wished Thor would put him down. He was so heavy.

Rhodey and Bruce carried Vision’s body between them, Bruce at his shoulders, Rhodey at his ankles. Natasha walked beside Thor with no expression. Her hand rested on Steve’s arm, the one that was dangling down, keeping it from swinging with Thor’s steps. She laced their fingers together when she caught him looking.

“Natasha,” Steve said.

“I know,” she said.

He believed her. He didn’t try to talk again.

Later, Thor deposited him on a sofa in a hallway that was mostly clear of rubble. Steve closed his eyes when Thor put his enormous hand to the crown of his head, briefly touching him, smoothing his thumb over the blonde cowlick that even Steve’s long hair couldn’t cure. Then he moved away. All of Steve’s friends — all of the ones who’d survived — left to go find the remnants of the royal family and discuss next steps. No one spoke louder than a murmur as they walked down the hall. They even kept their footsteps quiet.

 _T’Challa,_ Steve thought, and did not open his eyes. _Wanda. Sam._ He rolled over on the couch, pressing his face into the back cushion, and let the darkness cover him.

_Bucky._

 

* * *

 

He dreamed that Bucky was young again, young and laughing, body soft and boyish and untrained in battle.

“God,” Steve said, and gathered him up in his too-big arms. Bucky fit just as well as he always had, even though Steve was the taller one, and held Steve back tightly. “Thank god. I really thought I lost you this time.”

“Told you I’d follow you anywhere,” Bucky told him, voice muffled by the crook of Steve’s neck, where his face was buried. “Didn’t you believe me?”

 _No,_ Steve thought, because it had always seemed incredible that Bucky would follow him one single place, let alone everywhere. What had he ever done for him in return? He led him right to hell again and again, making Bucky claw his way out of the pit with his fingernails every damn time.

“Hey, hey,” Bucky said, and touched Steve’s face. His flesh-and-blood left fingertips came away wet when he took them back. “Don’t cry over me, Rogers.”

Steve opened his mouth to tell him any number of things, not the least of which was that it was his _privilege_ to cry over Bucky if he could, it was his honor, his duty, even —

 

* * *

 

— and opened his eyes to Natasha shaking him, hand on his shoulder.

“Sorry, Cap,” she said. She seemed to genuinely mean it. “But it’s been twelve hours. It’s time to get up.”

Twelve hours. Steve couldn’t remember the last time he’d stayed still that long, let alone slept through it. If he caught four hours in one sitting, he considered it a success. He sat up, because she asked him to, and rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes. Dirt and blood and black ooze from the creatures they’d spent the day murdering were all over him, staining him.

“Shower?” Natasha suggested, catching Steve’s disgusted glance at his hands.

Steve looked at where his fingers were curling, hands palm-up in his lap. “I don’t want to be alone,” he said.

Natasha took his hand. There was just as much dried blood beneath her fingernails as there was beneath his. “Okay, then,” she said. “Together.”

They stumbled toward the shower side by side, his arm slung over her shoulders, her arm slipped around his waist. He was reminded viscerally of that time in the mall years ago, when she’d dressed him up and pretended to be his fiance and taught him how to lie. She’d felt solid beneath his arm then, too.

She locked the bathroom door behind them and started to unbuckle her uniform. Steve turned on the water, then followed suit, peeling off his ruined gloves and unfastening every hidden clasp in the front of his costume until his hands shook too badly for him to continue. Natasha stepped forward and batted his fingers away, undoing the rest for him with nimble ease. He put his forehead down on her shoulder while she pushed it off his torso and onto the tiled floor.

“How many times are they gonna make me watch him die?” Steve murmured.

Her hands stilled. He could feel it when she sighed with her cheek pressed to his ear. “Too many already,” she murmured back. “Come on, Rogers. Get undressed.”

Steve sat on the toilet seat to take off his boots, pants, underwear. He had no self-consciousness left. Natasha made it feel like a locker room, anyway, the two of them stepping into the water and sharing it silently. She washed his back for him, getting the grime between his shoulder blades that he couldn’t reach, and he shampooed her hair in return with gentle fingertips. He could do this. He could be this, for her, for a moment.

“Blonde, huh,” he commented.

She bowed her head tiredly, ducking it under the spray. “It’s something I can change.”

Steve thought he could probably understand that better than most.

 

* * *

 

They all met up, briefly, before they separated to begin doing the work of assessing what could be done to restabilize Wakanda. Okoye and Shuri had called together an emergency meeting of the tribes while Steve had been passed out, and M’Baku had assumed temporary kingship with a unanimous vote and a solemn, haunted expression. Nakia and Okoye were already spearheading disaster relief efforts, putting on brave faces that did nothing to disguise their grief as anything other than what it was.

Steve, for his part, went where people pointed him and put things to rights, cleaned the streets, helped fix the perimeter that had been broken in the battle. He felt dumb and slow, pacing the edge of Wakanda like an animal and testing the barrier, but it needed doing. He owed Wakanda more than he could ever repay.

It took his mind off the forest for a while, too, and the bodies that were in it, that he had not even been allowed to bury.

When Sam had asked Steve what made him happy for the first time, years ago when Steve had thought he was the saddest he would ever be, he hadn’t had an answer for him. When Sam asked more recently, Steve just nudged him with his shoulder, smiling, hoping Sam would get it without him having to say the words out loud. The smile Sam gave him in return — one of his best, crinkling at the corners of his eyes — made Steve think that he understood. But he wished he’d said it, now.

He wished he’d said a lot of things.

Thor landed in the field next to him around nightfall, lightning splintering at his feet where he hit the ground. Steve glanced up, guarded, but he needn’t have been; all Thor did was offer him a hand, static crackling when he curled his fingers around Steve’s wrist.

“May I offer you a ride back back to the palace?” he asked, his mismatched eyes far more discerning than Steve was comfortable with.

“Seems like I’ve been making you carry me around a lot, lately,” Steve said wryly, and let Thor slide an enormous arm around his waist, holding him at his side while he took off. The wind rushing around them made it impossible to talk, but Steve and Thor had never been the kind of friends to spill their guts to each other, anyway. He was good to cling to, though. Steve was only somewhat surprised to discover this.

Thor set him down at the palace steps and the two ascended them together, side by side.

“New eye?” Steve asked, glancing at him.

Thor rubbed a thumb over his right brow. “Much has happened since I saw you last, Steven.”

Steve bowed his head, looking at his shoes. “Lost someone?” _More someones than I know about?_

“Half my people, along with our city. My father. My brother. A sister I never knew, who turned to darkness.”

Steve’s head snapped up again, horrified. Thor’s face was impassive, as long as Steve didn’t look at his trembling lips. “Shit,” he said, and touched Thor’s shoulder, stopping him in the hall. “Jesus Christ, Thor, just —” He couldn’t spit the damn words out, but he could haul Thor in by the back of his neck, embracing him with the least awkwardness that he could manage. Thor hugged him back immediately. Maybe warriors did this easier on Asgard.

“Thank you, my friend,” Thor said softly when they parted, hands clasped on Steve’s shoulders. “I see you’ve had your share of losses as well.”

Steve smiled tightly. “Nothing I haven’t lost before.” Thor’s face grew very concerned, so Steve looked away. “The others are waiting for us, aren’t they?”

Thor nodded slowly. He let Steve pull away, followed him silently toward the dining room where their friends were waiting, only intervening at the last second to hold the door for him, letting it close softly behind them both. It was just as well. Steve might have slammed it.

 

* * *

 

Steve only managed to choke down some food because Natasha kept _looking_ at him, and he was so afraid of what she was seeing. He did not want to be whatever it was that worried her so badly.

 

* * *

 

When he slept, he dreamed, and when he dreamed, it was of Bucky. This wasn’t a surprise to him, per se, but the Bucky in his dreams wasn’t usually so solemn. Usually he was either dying violently or laughing like it was easiest thing in the world.

Not this time, though. Bucky sat on the edge of Steve’s bed looking just how he did when he died this last time, hair long, eyes less tired than Steve expected them to be. Well-fed. Rested, even. Steve reached for him immediately and Bucky met him halfway, smiling slightly when Steve’s arms wrapped around him.

“I can’t stay long,” Bucky told him, pressing his face into Steve’s hair.

“Why not?” Steve asked.

“It’s taking a lot of effort to be here,” Bucky said, and tipped Steve’s face up to look at him with a couple fingertips beneath Steve’s chin. “Listen, do you trust me?”

Steve noted how cool Bucky’s metal fingers were, and wondered at the fact that he should notice such a detail, when he was certain he was asleep. “What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Steve.” Bucky was serious, and now he looked tired, mouth tight and drawn. “Please.”

“Fuckin’ hell, Bucky, of course I trust you,” Steve said raggedly. “I trust you more than anything.”

“Then go to where they killed me,” Bucky said. “I’ll explain more when I can. Will you do that for me?”

Steve didn’t want to go to where Bucky died. He wanted to hold Bucky here for as long as he was allowed, and then he wanted to lay down and never get up again. He was so tired of being where Bucky wasn’t, whether this meant on the other side of the world or on the other side of the veil between life and death. He’d had to live without him for so long.

But he could never say no, when it was Bucky that was asking something of him.

“Alright,” he said. “Alright, Buck.”

“Thank you,” Bucky said. He pressed something into Steve’s hand, wrapping his fist in a metal chain. “Now wake up.”

 

* * *

 

Steve opened his eyes. Dawn’s dim light was streaming in through the window like the hand of God, warming him where he lay, and he raised a hand to rub at his eyes — but he smacked himself in the face with a pair of dog tags when he did. Then the world fell out from under him, because he knew those tags. They were notched, as they all were in WWII. Little H in the bottom right-hand corner to denote the wearer’s Judaism.

Barnes, James B. 32557038.

 _You sure you wanna wear it like that so obvious?_ Steve had asked him back in the day, smoothing his thumb over Bucky’s name. _If the enemy gets you and sees that you’re_ _—_

 _I’m not gettin’ buried under a cross,_ Bucky had interrupted firmly, and that was that.

Bucky had always been so much braver than him.

Steve put the tags on, moving slowly, dazed. He’d stopped wearing his own a long while ago, half the reason being the lie of the Protestant P etched into them, and Bucky’s had fallen into the crevasse with him. He put his hand over where the tags landed on his collarbone, now, fingers caging over them. He’d forgotten how comforting the weight was.

 _Go to the place where they killed me,_ Bucky had said in the dream. _I’ll explain more when I can._ _Trust me_.

Steve trusted him. He trusted him enough to start hoping.

 

* * *

 

The forest was dark and foreboding even in the early morning sunshine. Steve paced the road that would take him back to the murder site, footfalls very heavy, heartbeat even heavier. He did not want to go back here. It was easier to finish it once he was on his way, though, and he leaned into that ease as best he could, with Bucky’s tags under his shirt. He hadn’t put his uniform on again since the battle. He’d have bared his teeth if anyone asked him to.

He recognized the spot immediately, and came to a reluctant halt in front of the tree that marked Bucky’s last footstep toward him. “Hiya, Buck,” he said softly, and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. What the hell was he doing here, really? He sat down at the base of the tree and leaned his back onto it. His hand drifted down automatically to curl around a little ash that was left.

“I came here,” he said aloud. He sounded very tired. “Like you asked, Buck. Could use some direction.” His head hit the tree behind him with a low thunk. “Don’t know the prayer for bringing someone back from the dead.”

 _“Mishebeirach ain’t good enough for you?”_ a voice murmured in his ear.

Steve squeezed his eyes closed. “This goes way past healing, pal.”

_“Maybe. You alright?”_

“Don’t really know how to answer that.” If Steve didn’t open his eyes, he could pretend Bucky was knelt in front of him, speaking to him directly. “You died again, so.”

 _“Not our fault, man,”_ came Sam’s voice, and Steve was so relieved to hear him that he could’ve cried. He clapped a hand over his mouth to keep the gasp inside, but it came out anyway, and he thought he heard a sympathetic noise along with a brief impression of someone’s hand on his shoulder.

“Sam,” Steve said. “God, Sam.”

 _“You have to help us,”_ Sam said. _“Thanos didn’t do the job right.”_

 _“Far as we can tell,”_ Bucky added, _“He tried to kill half the universe, but he only did it halfway.”_

Steve’s breath started to come a little faster, so he put both hands to his face, heels of his hands pressing into his eyes until yellow stars burst in front of his vision. What did it mean to kill someone halfway? He had only felt half alive for a very long time now, but that wasn’t nearly the same thing, and he had his best friends’ voices in his ear telling him now that they needed him. That he could do something to fix it.

He wasn’t a god, like Thor. He didn’t have powers like Wanda or Vision, didn’t have a Hulk inside him, or the ability to fly. All he had was his fists. But he would use them if they only showed him what to hit.

“Do you know how to fix it?” he asked.

 _“Listen close,”_ Sam told him. _“We don’t know if this is going to work.”_

That didn’t matter. Steve had already made his peace with having gone crazy — he would take any chance the universe saw fit to give him.

“Tell me what to do,” he said. “I’ll do anything. Just tell me.”

 

* * *

 

Steve had no time to dwell on what he’d learned, because as soon as got back, he found the others all crowded around Shuri’s television screen, watching the New York skyline burn.

“Oh, God,” Steve said, not for the first time.

He’d died seventy-three years ago to keep this very thing from happening. Bombs in the belly of the Valkyrie that he’d crashed into the water, expecting to die, disappointed when he woke up — he’d crashed headfirst into the water to keep New York safe. He couldn’t look away, now, from where Times Square was a mess of shattered windows and several skyscrapers were on fire.

“We have to do something,” Rhodey said, dazed.

Bruce had a flicker of green licking up his arms that he barely seemed to notice. “What can we do?”

Shuri shared a loaded glance with Okoye, and then fiddled with her necklace. Steve’s eyes tracked the way she stroked over the metal tines, the ones that curled into claws over her collar bones, and raised an eyebrow at her. She just barely shrugged back.

Steve guessed Wakanda needed a Black Panther of some kind. T’Challa would be proud of her. But he couldn’t think about T’Challa, or he’d get sucked into the bad feeling that swirled ominously around his feet, threatening to drag him under. He had things to do.

Rhodey turned to Shuri and Okoye to start discussing their options, and Steve took Thor’s arm and pulled him aside, heart beating faster in his chest as his mind raced over how to explain what had happened to him without sounding like he’d lost his mind. It had only taken Bucky’s voice in his head and the tags around his neck to convince him, but he knew what it sounded like, what _he_ sounded like.

“I need your help,” he told Thor, still touching his arm. “I don’t think Bucky’s really dead.”

Thor frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

“Not all the way.” Steve licked his lips, wetting them. “He’s — he’s been talking to me. I saw him.”

“I know you’ve been grieving, Steven,” Thor said slowly. “As have I. But we have pressing matters to attend to.”

“I’ve had dreams,” Steve started, but he broke off before he could continue. Thor was right. New York was on fire. The weight of Bucky’s tags around his neck seemed small, with that kind of backdrop.

“I’ve had dreams too,” Natasha said, closer to Steve’s back than he’d anticipated. He jumped a little, turning to her, and watched her fiddling with a ring on her finger. It took a moment for him to place where he knew it from, but once he had, his stomach clenched. Wanda.

He took her hand, feeling the ring on her finger. She looked at him, guarded but hopeful, and he smiled. “Bucky and Sam told me what to do,” he said. “Will you help?”

“It would not be the first time I conversed with ghosts,” Thor said after a brief pause, and exhaled heavily. “Lead the way.”

 

* * *

 

Steve led the way back into the forest with Natasha and Thor at his back. A quiet fell over the three of them, a quiet that was unbroken by birds or other animals, the whole forest gone still. Steve wondered if they could feel it too, the way that the air crackled around the spot where the mind stone had been shattered out of Vision’s head.

He could feel it. But maybe that was just his body reacting to the place where Bucky died again.

“Here,” he said, standing at the foot of the tree where he’d heard Sam and Bucky’s voices. “They spoke to me here.”

They were silent now, but he thought he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder for a moment, and when he turned, Thor had a strange look on his face. His new eye glowed.

“What is it?” Steve asked.

Thor said nothing, just stepped forward, reaching up a hand to hang in front of himself briefly before it dropped back to his side. “Nothing. What were your instructions, Steven?”

“I’m supposed to find the exact spot where Vision —” Steve cut himself off. “Where the mind stone was shattered.”

The three of them spread out in the clearing, not certain what they were looking for, but they looked all the same. It had been somewhere here. The imprint of where Vision’s body had lay was no longer in the grass, but Steve’s feet remembered watching him fall to the ground, it made every footstep more heavy than it should have been.

“Here,” Natasha called out.

Steve glanced up sharply, stepping toward her. “What is it?”

She pointed to a spot in the air that did not seem notable at first, until Steve walked close enough that he could see a slight shimmer right at the tip of her finger. Like any other mirage, it was difficult to focus on too hard, difficult to completely understand what he was looking at. It hovered in the air, an inch long yellow-gold sparkle, and he squinted his eyes at it. Trying to figure it out.

“This the spot?” Natasha asked.

“Seems likely,” Steve answered. He was afraid of what he had to do next. But what else could he do? He did what Bucky told him. “Get ready,” he called out.

He pushed a finger from each hand into the shimmer and watched them disappear through the rip in the air, hooked them around the blister-hot edges, and tore it open as hard as he could.

 

* * *

 

_Memories flowed over Steve like a river._

_In 1931, Steve had an asthma attack in the middle of his bar mitzvah and choked on his aliyah. Bucky elbowing his way out of the crowd was an image that stuck with him for many years, Bucky with his tallit streaming out behind him like a cape, yarmulke falling off his head when the pin fell out of his messy curls, nearly kicking the rabbi in the shin to get to Steve. Bucky had always battled his way to him through anything, damn the audience._

_Even at age thirteen, Steve had known how precious this was. And it said something, that the rabbi had just muttered something that sounded like “Why should tonight be different from other nights,” before allowing Bucky to stay on the bimah and keep an arm around Steve when he was ready to try again._

_With Bucky’s arm snaked under Steve’s tallit to hold him, Steve’s voice had only faltered a little as he picked up the Hebrew again. It felt better, anyway, to do it with Bucky at his side._

 

* * *

 

Someone was screaming.

Steve realized it was himself when his throat started to hurt.

His muscles strained with the act of holding the tear open, ripping it wider, forcing both hands inside the edges so he could get good handholds. The tear was about a foot long at this point, big enough that he could see inside it if he tried, if his eyes weren’t watering so hard.

Natasha was hollering his name, but it sounded to Steve as though she was very distant, yelling from underwater. He hoped she wasn’t in pain because of what he was doing. He very badly did not want to hurt her. His own pain, if it could free Bucky and Sam and all the others from the limbo they were trapped in... well, he could handle it. He was built for this. He’d been made to take the punishment so others didn’t have to.

The pain was his privilege. He dug his heels into the soft dirt and pulled as hard as he could.

 

* * *

 

_Bucky, kissing Steve’s forehead before he left for work when he thought Steve was asleep._

_Steve, laughing too hard at Bucky’s dirty jokes during serious war meetings, trying to stifle the noise behind a hand but failing because of his awful, honking laugh_ _— much to the chagrin of their CO —_

_The way that Sam would put his hand dead center between Steve’s shoulder blades when Steve tensed up, which soothed him instantly. The secret smile he and Steve shared every time they successfully completed a mission together, half pain, half relief to be alive._

_Bucky and Sam, bickering over nothing, always afraid to let on that they actually cared about each other._

_When the river of memories threatened to pull him under, Steve didn’t fight it. Not this time._

 

* * *

 

Steve fell to his knees.

He didn’t even feel it when they made contact with the dirt.

He’d fallen to his knees many times, now, under a variety of circumstances. When HYDRA grunts forced him to kneel in front of the Red Skull in the ‘40s. When the same HYDRA grunts with different faces pushed him to the ground some seventy-odd years later, after he’d just discovered Bucky was alive. He was, objectively, used to the drop, and the ache that shot up his legs after.

What he was not used to was a warm broad hand on the back of his neck, dredging him back to his senses.

“You’re doing well, Steven,” Thor said. “But you do not have to do this alone, and you should not have tried.”

Thor lay his hands overtop Steve’s, helping him wrench the opening wider. Steve was gratified to notice that Thor’s enormous arms had to strain as well in order to open it any further than Steve had gotten it already.

The sound of running footsteps made Steve look up wearily through bloodshot eyes to see Okoye and Natasha run up to where he and Thor were struggling.

“I brought help,” Natasha said, wild-eyed.

“Move out of the way,” Okoye said, stepping up to the left side of the tear. “This will work much better if you have someone on either side.”

Steve hauled himself up to his feet again to help her. Natasha and Thor took the other side.

“Bruce? Rhodey?” Steve grunted, clenching his hands tight around the edge of the tear.

“On their way,” Natasha replied, just as strained.

Steve could feel it when their combined efforts finally worked. There was an audible snap that he could feel all the way up his arms, rattling his joints in their sockets, teeth grinding painfully together when he stumbled a step backwards. He surveyed their handiwork: the rip in the air was maybe eight feet tall, twelve feet wide, sparking sharply at the edges. It was difficult to look at dead-on.

“What next?” Okoye asked.

Then the ghosts began to pour out.

A slow trickle of one or two confused people stepping out of the doorway they’d torn open became five, ten, twenty, fifty — people that shimmered translucent gold until they set foot on solid ground and became real once more. Steve had seen enough people fly by now that he was not surprised, exactly, when the ghosts took to the air like some kind of swarm. But maybe this was because he’d simply run out of the capacity to be shocked for one day.

“Oh,” Thor said. Steve looked at him. “They are being put back to their rightful positions.”

 _Go to the spot where they killed me,_ Steve heard in his head once more, and shivered.

Fifty people became one hundred, became two hundred, became a thousand, yellow-gold ghosts spilling out and taking flight. The looks on their faces were a mixture of confused, horrified, rapturous. Steve watched them with wide eyes. Waiting. Hoping.

He didn’t know how long he stood there with the others, completely rapt. Shuri, Bruce, and Rhodey joined them eventually, back in their armor. Shuri had the Black Panther mask on, but she took it off after a while, presumably to see better. Okoye put a hand on her shoulder.

Steve figured Natasha could use some of the same. He slung an arm around her shoulders, pulling her to his side. She leaned into it without question.

Two thousand. Ten thousand. A hundred thousand. Steve stopped being able to estimate how many there were, all he could focus on was the way the speed picked up, spitting out more and more ghosts in a stampede. How could Thanos have wanted this? How could anybody? It was easy to listen to the words 'half the universe' and not comprehend them, but Steve was seeing now the reality of how many half was, and it was so goddamn many.

Eventually — a very long eventually — the current of ghosts slowed from its zenith, and Steve started shifting his weight from foot to foot, anxiously searching the crowd for the faces he wanted to see the most badly. The faces he’d done this for. But he’d been with Bucky in the military, and he knew better than most that Buck would make sure everybody else got out before he did. Sam too.

As the procession slowed to a trickle, Steve thought his heart, even serumed-up as it was, might give out.

“Replacing me so soon, little sister?” T’Challa said, voice fond and amused, and Shuri threw herself at him. He caught her, spinning her around in a circle before he put her back down again and squeezed her armored shoulders in his hands. “You wear it well.”

“Wakanda needed a Black Panther,” Shuri told him, voice trembling. “You can have it back now. I’m already thinking of improvements.”

“You would not be you if you didn’t,” T’Challa laughed. “General, it is good to see you.”

Okoye’s shoulders were still squared, but her eyes were a little wet. “I have lost my king a few times too many,” she said, opening and closing her hands a couple times.

“Wanda,” Natasha said, and darted out from under Steve’s arm so fast she was a blur. The two of them collided, Wanda squeaking when Natasha embraced her, both of them enveloped in a whirl of red and white hair.

“Sammy!” Rhodey yelped. Sam stepped out of the shimmer and into Rhodey’s arms. He gave him a nice hug, clapping him on the back, and then Steve’s body caught up with the rest of him and he jogged over, not even pretending he was going to do anything but clutch at Sam like he was a lifeline.

“I’m sorry,” he told the crook of Sam’s neck.

“Shut up,” Sam replied, not unkindly. He rubbed his hands up and down Steve’s back a couple times. “You did good, Steve.”

“You’re a hell of a sight for sore eyes,” Steve said, and meant it. He pulled back, squeezing Sam’s shoulder. “You look pretty good, for a dead man.”

Sam snorted. “And you look pretty bad for a young one. Oh, wait.”

Steve was smiling so hard it hurt. He was about to press for more, ask Sam how he really was, if he needed anything, when he heard a familiar voice behind him drawl "We really gotta stop meeting like this," and he had to whirl around on his heel.

All he saw was Bucky’s smile, a flash of teeth and eyes creasing at the corners, and Steve was on him. He couldn’t remember consciously telling his body to move, all he knew was that Bucky was there, and that meant he had to be too. He crushed Bucky close with a hand on the back of his head and an arm around his waist, threading fingers through dark hair. He panted a little into his neck.

“Buck,” Steve whispered, clinging.

“I know,” Bucky murmured, clinging back. “I know.”

The shimmer snapped shut behind them, but Steve didn’t care. He couldn’t look anywhere but at Bucky’s eyes. “Alive is a good look for you,” Steve said. He cupped Bucky’s jaw in his hand. “How about you quit dying for a while, how’s that?”

“You drive a hard bargain,” Bucky said, voice wavering, and his smile was so watery and full of longing that Steve bent to kiss him before he could think twice.

Bucky made a soft, wanting sound in the back of his throat and kissed back. His mouth was soft and warm and very good for kissing, just like Steve had always hoped it would be, when he had allowed himself the luxury of hoping. The way that Bucky chased his lips when Steve drew back was flattering.

“I wasn’t gonna wait for you to die again before I did that,” Steve said, ragged.

“Our timing could be better,” Bucky agreed with a laugh, but his face was slack with an awe that belied his nonchalance.

Steve kissed him again, and again, and would’ve kept it up if he didn’t start crying in the middle, gasping wetly against Bucky’s lips like he was fifteen and asthmatic again. Bucky just made a choking noise like he couldn’t decide if he was going to laugh again or join him, petting Steve’s hair back from his forehead, stroking down the back of Steve’s neck until his fingers hit the chain of his own dog tags.

“Thank you for listening when I found you,” Bucky said quietly, curling a finger around the chain. Steve could feel his metal thumb rubbing against it. “It can’t have been easy to believe.”

Steve shook his head before Bucky even finished talking. “It’s you,” he said, wiping at his eyes. “It’s always been easier to believe you were alive than otherwise.”

Bucky pulled Steve in again by the dog tags in lieu of reply, and Steve went, as he always did, where Bucky told him. He was not surprised that Bucky’s kiss felt like a homecoming, but it shocked him how easy it was to kiss him, how his hands didn’t hesitate to hold his (solid, real) waist like they belonged there.

Bucky had melted into the air many times, now. Steve had witnessed it more than any one man should have had to. But he’d also witnessed Bucky come back to him again and again, and this was not the kind of blessing that he would overlook.

Bucky had never once stopped fighting his way home.

 

* * *

 

Much later, they all gathered in T’Challa’s largest meeting room, tangled up in pairs and threes of people who were not willing yet to stop touching each other. Natasha had Wanda and Bruce at her sides, Shuri had not stopped holding her brother while Okoye stood at her rightful spot at T’Challa’s back, Rhodey stood close enough to Sam that their arms were brushing. No one that Thor had been looking for had stepped through, so he’d taken a moment to compose himself before he’d come in, and was now seated with his elbows resting on his bent knees. Bruce went to him after a moment and quietly put a hand on his back.

Steve held Bucky’s hand. The cool metal warmed the longer it rested against his skin.

“I believe,” T’Challa said, “that it is time we take a second pass at Thanos.”

“We have the element of surprise on our side this time,” Rhodey said wryly. “Giving him hell might be easier now when he won’t see us coming.”

“The Avengers, back in business?” Bruce asked, quirking a small smile.

Thor looked away. Steve guessed he had the most to avenge out of all of them now, with the current tally.

“For Vision,” Wanda said softly.

“For three and a half billion people who had to die and then got dragged all the way back,” Rhodey added, rubbing a hand over his jaw.

“For those who died and did not come back.” Thor was still staring at the wall to his left, jaw clenching and unclenching. Bruce didn’t take his hand off of Thor’s back, but he did stand a little closer.

Steve held Bucky’s hand tighter, stroking his thumb over the curve of Bucky’s wrist. “For ourselves,” he said. “Because he made us watch it happen.”

“This won’t be easy,” Sam pointed out. “We might all die again.”

“Better together than apart,” Bucky said. He looked up at Steve.

Steve looked back. “Better together,” he echoed, and didn’t say _until the end of the line,_  but he bet Bucky could hear it anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is also known as "the one where the Avengers & co. hug as much as I've always wanted them to", which I definitely only wrote out of spite.
> 
> I'm transbucky on tumblr! Come say hi :)


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